Poems by Megan Kitching

Bell Curve

Megan Kitching

Published on
page 21 of Tarot #6
(June 2023)

The shape of afternoon:
tī kōuka billow brown,
blooming ice-cream cones
on an hourglass sky

a trickle in time, when
a bumblebee unclasps
clover, blinks into foxglove
udders and disappears

sleeps a hundred years
in sherbet stippled
flowers nodding their
secret campanology

as the garden dons its moss-
stitched robe, shade
stretching with a yawn
across this meanwhile

until a porcelain cup
on the sill prints
an absent rose, the ruru cry
of a rising moon.

Pylon

Megan Kitching

Published on
page 22 of Tarot #6
(June 2023)

The pylon is a skymark
of this gridlocked world:
rain coming down,
metal mortised into cloud
welding the weather to the beaten ground.

And it is horizon’s ladder,
a lunar lander with strut and rivet
where it aspires
above the old freezing works,
the lightning belts of pines.

Sunstruck it is a pile of lines
worked into the hill:
two scimitars
sliced clear of wires
eloping into the tungsten glare.

Yet climbing into dark
this tower travels nowhere; is only
the moon’s escalator,
a starlit tuning fork
thrumming its counterpoint to dreams.

Sandsmoke

Megan Kitching

Published on
page 23 of Tarot #6
(June 2023)

Walking, and the wind skimming
swallow-low at my ankles

peeled away the smoking sand.
Furled in gusts of mineral light

like braided, cat-stroked grass
it played around my feet

in currents of palest bone, a ghost sea
through whose lures I waded

to a parched, hair-thin tune.
The surf soughed as the beach

streamed out of its body
just ahead of each step

leaving a swept floor gilded
with the barest chime of grains.

Almost-words, whose powdery,
moth wing script lifted

singing seaward as I followed
their ephemeral drift,

a palimpsest inked and erased
under the salt air’s aurora.

Swept Away

Megan Kitching

Published on
page 24 of Tarot #6
(June 2023)

As I walk by the insomniac sea,
under sandbags washed white

by an avalanche tide, the ledge
of beach incrementally slender,

I meet a woman working upshore
the other way. If a tsunami came,

she says, arms arcing wide, I’d let
the sharks devour me, and her laugh

dances us towards the limit
where the city becomes a shanty

rafted and swept away
from our landlocked past, more

and more unreal as if no-one lives
in houses flooded in a tea-time fug,

the sports field goalposts
stuck on nil, those nonsensical cars.